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A new study that’s sure to stoke political fires about same-sex marriage indicates that children raised by lesbian parents do just as well, or not, as those raised by heterosexual parents. 

Researchers from New York University conducted an analysis of essentially all of the research to-date on same-sex parenting. The bottom line result: kids in both heterosexual and lesbian households had similar levels of academic achievement, number of friends and overall well-being. (You can view the study online here in the Journal of Marriage and Family.)

Kids benefit most from “committed, stable, and responsible parenting,” in the words of lead researcher, Judith Stacey, and whether those parents are a man and woman or two women doesn’t seem to matter very much.

LiveScience summarized the study highlights:

In a study of nearly 90 teens, half living with female same-sex couples and the others with heterosexual couples, both groups fared similarly in school. Teen boys in same-sex households had grade point averages of about 2.9, compared with 2.65 for their counterparts in heterosexual homes. Teen girls showed similar results, with a 2.8 for same-sex households and 2.9 for girls in heterosexual families.

In another study, teens were asked about delinquent activities, such as damaging others’ property, shoplifting and getting into fights, in the previous year. Teens in both same-sex and heterosexual households got essentially the same average scores of about 1.8 on a scale from 1 to 10 (with higher scores meaning more delinquent behaviors).

A 2008 study comparing 78 lesbian families in the United States with their counterparts (lesbian households) in the Netherlands, showed American kids were more than twice as likely as the Dutch to be teased about their mothers’ sexual orientation.

These findings add support to previous research that’s found kids raised by same-sex partners generally do just as well in school as kids raised by heterosexual couples.  One study in particular, which used Census data rather than smaller population samples (often criticized as “convenient samples”), looked at thousands of kids raised by same-sex parents and found no difference in grade retention (when a child gets held back in school) after accounting for demographics, such as income.

Quoting Michael J. Rosenfeld of Stanford University, who conducted the Census study:

Grade retention is a pretty strong predictor of problems later in life including dropping out of high school and mortality.  LiveScience

Will these results convince critics of same-sex parenting to reevaluate their positions in light of the evidence?  Probably not. As politically and religiously entrenched as this issue is, same-sex parenting opponents will likely view these results as another liberal social science volley.

But for everyone else seeking a statistically well-grounded perspective from which to view this issue, these are enlightening results.

HT: LiveScience

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The founders of the Baby Einstein video series have taken the University of Washington to court to force the release of research data they claim the University has been suspiciously keeping under wraps for years.

Two peer-reviewed studies conducted by UW professors, published in 2004 and 2007, allegedly link television viewing by young children with attention-deficit problems and delayed language development. The more recent study specifically calls out “baby DVDs” as a culprit. Viewed as landmark studies by much of the pediatric establishment, they helped cripple the Baby Einstein brand, a target of criticism from multiple sources over the last decade.

Most of the criticism levied against Baby Einstein is that it simply doesn’t work. Your baby won’t become smarter watching it, no matter how entranced she is with the gyrating shapes and colors. Fair enough. Any product that makes a claim can and should be challenged to ensure that consumers aren’t being duped.  If the product doesn’t do what its makers claim it does, off to the trash bin with it and good riddance. The now-owner of Baby Einstein, Disney, has even gone so far as to offer refunds to anyone who purchased the DVDs (mainly to avoid a class action lawsuit).

What’s different about the UW research, however, is that it’s not merely calling into question the efficacy of a product. It’s claiming to link the product (and young kids’ TV viewing overall) with serious neurobehavioral consequences. 

William Clark, co-founder of Baby Einstein, claimed in court that he’s been requesting the data supporting these claims for a long time.

In his complaint, Mr. Clark said the university initially told him that it was not required to release the data for the 2004 study because doing so could hurt the researchers’ competitiveness, an exemption that lasts five years. Then, the complaint said, in response to a renewed request last year, after the five-year period had expired, the university said it could not find records for the 2004 study.

On the 2007 study, the complaint said, the university sent incomplete data, redacted so as to make re-analysis impossible.

New York Times, January 12 2010

I don’t know if Clark’s claims are entirely accurate, but if they are, the credibility of the UW research program is suspect. What’s worse, reactions to the suspiciousness of its behavior will rub off on other researchers at other universities.

If the University stands behind the research, it should be more than happy to release the raw data right down to the last decimal point. Why not? Science is predicated on replicability. If the analysis was sound the first time, follow-up analysis should produce similar outcomes. But in this case we’re forced to wonder if that’s true. For social science to deserve the same level of respect given the “hard” sciences (and I strongly believe it does), social science researchers should be willing to play by the same rules. 

Bottom line: the results of both studies should be viewed skeptically until the University produces the complete and unaltered data sets, period. 

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of James Dickey’s novel, Deliverance (the movie, directed by John Boorman, came out two years later).  Even if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, you’re probably familiar with their themes and highlights, etched as they are in our cultural memory.

If you heard the song “Dueling Banjos” for example, you’d probably know it was in the movie. Or if someone slipped the term “squeal like a pig” into conversation, you’d get the allusion (and you might also decide to cut the chat short).

But beyond its piecemeal resonance, Deliverance is an important book for meatier reasons—most notably that it’s a no-holds-barred disclosure of the male psyche. On that count, it’s right up there with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and virtually no book involving strong themes of male psychology has been written since Deliverance that doesn’t in some way bow to the master. 

Dickey was a rough-hewn genius obsessed with what makes a man, and Deliverance is his archetypal opus. Each of the four main characters is one dimension of Dickey’s conception of the male psyche: a gregarious but arrogant salesman; a practical but visionless businessman; a creative but ungrounded artist; and a strong but reckless survivor with a blue collar mindset.

Everything these characters endure in the course of the story is calculated to put their natural tendencies at odds with circumstance. Dickey places them in lawless nature so they can’t rely on civilized conventions. He chooses sexual violation as the catalyst to set the archetypes in motion, and then casts a fog of moral ambiguity over every decision they make. Is murder justified?  When is it justified? Is not disclosing murder justified? Is it better to disclose anything or internalize it all and move on?

Highest among the themes Dickey tackles is domination, both physical and psychological, and both external and internal. The sadistic hillbillies present the threat of external domination, but that’s almost ancillary to the power dynamic waged between the strongest of the archetypes (the role in the movie that made Burt Reynolds a megastar) and the others.

This is where Dickey’s genius really shines. In the violent chaos of the story, where any decision could end a life, personality consensus is not an option. Someone is going to overpower the others and make definitive decisions, and those decisions will permanently change the others for better or worse.

I have a sense that Dickey had a bit of perverse fun with this theme; at times an especially morbid brand of dark humor slips in just a little—not enough to take over the story, but enough to be noticed.  Things like that make me wonder if in person Dickey was the sort of brilliant scheming jokester that everyone likes being around but almost no one trusts.

I’m also tempted to call Dickey a prophet of things to come, though I’m sure he never thought of himself that way.  Ever since 9/11, I haven’t been able to shake the idea that you can overlay Dickey’s archetypal tension on those who made subsequent decisions and find some disturbing parallels. The U.S. is violently attacked by external forces, setting in motion a chain of events each spawning life and death decisions.  Our leaders say we must kill those responsible, and we agree—in this instance, murder is justified. People who would do something so horrible have no right to live. 

But George Bush, whose personality matrix is dominated by the quick-to-decide survivor, pushes the question beyond those limits by arguing that not only is that murder justified, but so is another by virtue of a relationship with those who assaulted us. Not only that, argues the survivor, but if we fail to kill them, they will no doubt kill us.  The debate is sparked, but it doesn’t last long. Someone is going to dominate and irrevocably change everyone else.

I realize you can only push the parallels so far, but my point is that the same tensions that played out within and around Bush and others in the administration can be understood in the light of Dickey’s brilliance. That is, of course, just one way of looking at it. But the mere fact that solid lines can be drawn from Dickey’s words to events with real consequences—all so far removed from his book—testifies to rare insight into human nature, and male psychology in particular. 

For all of the reasons mentioned, and many more, Deliverance is one of the most important books of the last 50 years, and James Dickey may well be one of the most undervalued deconstructors of the male psyche in literary history. On the 40^th anniversary of his masterpiece, I raise a glass to his talent and hope that all the writers who have benefited by his influence will take a moment to do the same. Cheers.

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Let’s say that you’re on eBay and see an auction for something you really want.  You end up having to fight for it right down to the wire, but eventually lose to a last second sniper. Annoyed, you go prowling around and find the same item for more money as a Buy it Now.  Without hesitation, you buy it, paying a substantial premium over the ending price from the auction you just lost. 

A week later the item arrives at your house. You open the box and are elated, right? Wrong. In fact, you can’t even recall why you liked the thing so much to begin with.  That night you put it back up for auction on eBay.

Does this make any sense to you?

A new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that this scenario, with whichever elements you’d rather sub in, isn’t only plausible, it’s predictable, and it has much to do with the peculiar love-hate relationship between wanting and liking.

As we’ve all experienced, when you really want something but are prevented from getting it, you want it all the more. This is even truer of relationships than objects. The jilted lover syndrome is a Hollywood mainstay because just about everyone can relate. 

Researchers started with that well-known phenomenon and wanted to know how they could create a “counter-drive” dynamic between wanting and liking—that is, causing someone to pursue her ‘want’ even after her ‘like’ is gone. 

In one experiment, participants were offered an opportunity to win a prize they said they wanted. When they failed to win (in other words, when their ‘want’ was jilted), they were offered the opportunity to buy the same item for more money than it cost those who won it. By a significant margin, those who were jilted did exactly that.  But when then asked if they’d like to trade the item away, most of the jilted crew said “yep, take it.” 

In another experiment, participants were given the opportunity to win Guess sunglasses.  Those who were jilted and didn’t win the sunglasses were then presented with an opportunity to choose between a Guess wristwatch and a Calvin Klein wristwatch. Most of those who were jilted chose the Guess wristwatch. You might think that’s because they really like Guess products, right? Nope. When asked for their evaluation of Guess wristwatches, they rated them surprisingly low.

What’s going on here?  The research team believes that when our desire is stoked, we’re in an intense emotional go-mode. But when we’re jilted, the intensity of our emotion goes negative, and that negativity rubs off on the object of our original desire. The weird thing is that the same intensity still pushes us forward to get (or try to get) the thing we wanted even when we’re beyond liking it.     

When it comes to relationships, needless to say, this story frequently ends badly. And god knows eBay makes a ridiculous amount of money leveraging the same dynamic.  Yet another bit of evidence that rationality isn’t such a dependable ally when our limbic system dials up the desire.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

A few days ago Dr. Phil scolded a mother on his show for her obsession with Farmville, the insanely popular game that more than 11 million people on Facebook are playing.  According to the woman, she’d all but stopped interacting with her family or doing anything other than tending her thriving virtual crops and animals.  She even allegedly unplugged the router in her house to make sure her daughter couldn’t get online, and then reconnected it to secretly get back to working the farm.

Dr. Phil told the woman,

You unplugged it because you have a ridiculous addiction to a ridiculous computer game that’s interfering with your ability to be a mother. You needed a fix, and she [the daughter] wouldn’t get off, so you had to create the opportunity.

Dr. Phil’s response illustrates why pop psychology will always be limited when it comes to making real contributions to understanding important topics.

Note, first, that this woman could hardly be an easier target for Dr. Phil’s wrath. She’s neglecting her family for a cartoonish digital simulation featuring sunflowers and little lost lambs. What could be more ridiculous?  And that’s exactly what Dr. Phil needs to wield his tried and true brand of psych reductionism. The “solution” to her problem is so obvious, needing only Dr. Phil’s force of personality to make it explicitly clear.  What is the solution?

Unplug it and walk away.

On the circus that is talk show television, this is entertaining fodder for snippet hungry audiences. The KISS principle applies: Keep It Simple Stupid.

But I’ve spent enough time working through the research on the psychosocial effects of social networking to know that Dr. Phil is doing this woman and his audience a disservice.  I started digging into the topic precisely because I was sick of hearing reductionistic platitudes (ala Dr. Phil) on one hand, and baseless alarmism on the other, and wanted to discover what credible research was really uncovering about how the social networking juggernaut is affecting us. 

My search culminated in an article for Scientific American Mind magazine, out now in the January/February issue. Check it out if the topic interests you, and I’d be more than happy to discuss the subject here or via email.  For the sake of this post, however, there are just a few items I’d like to mention.

First, while it fits Dr. Phil’s format to castigate the Farmville mom, the truth is that playing a computer simulation—however silly it might sound—is just a symptom of a far deeper problem for this woman, and for thousands of others.  Consider that in the U.S. roughly one out of every 50 people displays hallmarks of obsessive-compulsive disorder.  When someone with an obsessive-compulsive predisposition begins using Facebook and playing Farmville, or any of the other simulations, the likelihood of problematic use is significantly higher than for someone who doesn’t bring these tendencies to the technology.  And the technology—a supremely effective instant gratification delivery system–accelerates the effect.

According to researchers I interviewed for the article, one of the strongest dynamics driving the obsession is mood regulation in response to social anxiety. One of the experts I interviewed was Scott Caplan, professor and social media researcher at the University of Delaware. Here’s a clip from the section about his research:

A consistent factor across many of the studies in this realm is that social networking is simply a new forum for bad habits. Social media researcher Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware says, “People who prefer online interaction over face-to-face interaction also score higher on measures of compulsive Internet use and using the Internet to alter their moods.”

In 2007 Caplan conducted a study of 343 undergraduate students to determine what stoked the fires of compulsive behavior online. He homed in on personality traits that leave people vulnerable, such as loneliness and social anxiety, and online activities that attract people with compulsive tendencies, such as playing video games, watching pornography and gambling. Of these variables, social anxiety emerged as the strongest.

“Socially anxious individuals who have problems with face-to-face interactions are drawn to the unique features of online conversation,” Caplan says. In time, they may start using social networking compulsively to regulate their mood, and the self-feeding cycle begins.

To highlight the main point: social anxiety was the single most compelling factor driving obsessive use, outpacing even pornography. Can an issue this potent be solved with “unplug it and walk away”?  Maybe for some, but for most, probably not.   

There’s nothing special about Farmville or any other computer simulation. Most people play these games without any significant interference in their lives. People who develop problems, like the mother on Dr. Phil, are predisposed to getting hooked on the latest brand of heroine, and if it wasn’t that brand, it would be another.

So my concluding message to Dr. Phil is this: we all know that your job is to make your show compelling and entertaining, and it’s obvious that targeting the addiction de jour is a standard part of your format. But you should be aware that when you couch significant problems as ridiculous and easy-to-solve personality quirks, you’re contributing to the pop psych smokescreen that makes understanding the real issues all the more difficult. What’s worse, you are misleading your audience–and isn’t that exactly the opposite of what you claim your show is all about?